Introduction
by
G.M. FOSTER
I've worked with many jazz musicians in my life, including Art Blakey, Juniah
Booth, Ron Carter, John D'Earth, Joel Futterman, Burton Greene, Dave Kikoski,
Stefan Lessard, LeRoi Moore, Hilton Ruiz, Walid Taha El, Omar Wilson, and
others. I learned more about creative improvisation from Buhaina [Art Blakey]
than from any writer. He used to say: "You have to give up everything you
know in every performance." Creative improvisation takes a lifetime of
preparation and practice.
New poems are composed in my mind long before I commit words to paper. Writing
is the gesture of a prepared mind. When I read a poem in performance with jazz
artists, I improvise on the written text, introducing new phrases, images,
stanzas - whole strings of ideas that come through me. Responses arise in
rhythm and tone as we listen to each other. A parallel consciousness is born
out of collaboration: not the ordinary working mind, not the subconscious, but
a third state. I may feel like a deer standing in the road, stunned by the
headlights, but I'm speaking.
No poem is simple, though it may appear to be so. Machado says: "Enigmas are
not man-made exceptions - they are in the world, like mountains and mice."
It's not what you look at but what you see. Why should poems tell us what we
already know? Is a poem more simple in its movements than a solar system?
Less complex than a mosquito drawing your blood? As easy to grasp as the
action of DNA?
"An assumed simplicity is worse than a theft," runs the adage. Conscious
simplicity is the worst depravity. Are Emily Dickenson's poems simple? The
great myths of the Bushmen of Angola or Australia? So-called 'primitive'
cultures, like their languages, are subtle and complex. It is our culture
that exalts and counterfeits simplicity. We all exist at the same distance
from our origins. What is actually present in our ersatz simplicity is a
profound falsehood which starves us and blunts every sense. Only productive
complexity corresponds to our experience of life.
It is a mere trick of rhetoric to praise the simple at the expense of the
difficult.
Adorno has said: "The vulgar praises itself in a triumph of hollow jargon -
this vulgar style is not 'of the people', it addresses the people, and with
ill-concealed contempt."
The Pymatuning Marsh, on the edge of which I was born in 1941, is no wasteland,
but a rich web of life. Meadeville, PA, was nicknamed "The Zipper City" after
the Talon Company's zipper factory. From this town, lost in the meanders of
French Creek, my family moved to the suburbs of New Jersey - a swamp of a
different sort. In fleeing tragedy (the death of my older brother,
Robert) we arrived at emptiness. The honking of geese was replaced by the
silence of streets, and houses lit by the evil blue light of television.
I learned the art of printing from my grandfather, who edited and published a
small newspaper in the Midwest. Roaming the country I worked first as a
journeyman, then as a master printer. (I was Artist-in-Residence at the
Charlottesville, Va., Art of the Book Center, in 1996-97.) To get away from
the presses from time to time I drove a taxi and herded horses (joining the
IWW in 1964). I have been a freelance editor and the editor of a
literary/spiritual/satirical magazine (The Moorish Science Monitor, which
Peter L. Wilson and I founded).
My poems were first published when I was seventeen. Since then they have
appeared in such magazines as: The Leaf, The Link, Notes on the Garage Door,
The Destruction of Philadelphia, Timbuktu, The Home Planet News, etc.
My first two books were hand-printed and distributed free: Dynamite, and
Smallbone. I've also printed and distributed many broadsheets and poster/poems.
A new book, RENDITIONS, has been published by SU-PRESS (Athens, Greece) and
is distributed in North America by Autonomedia (New York). Another new
collection is due out from ODRADEK (Toulouse, France) later this year.
A poem's commitment to the truth puts it in the realm of ethics. "The poet
stands at the junction of ethics and the natural world," writes Elytis. Only
man has ethics and only man needs them. Ethics and aesthetics are rooted in
the same soil and thrive (or perish) under the same sun. Poetry begins in
spells, divine chants, and intoxication - it is born in magic, like
mathematics.
Poetry is a restless resistance to the immense stupidity that surrounds us.
Since poems strive for truthfulness, how can it be otherwise? When some poet
is cosseted by the State, watch out! Something is dead somewhere.
October 2007

G.M. FOSTER
A TRIP TO MYOPIA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Time Lapse
sky of slate
summer thunder
the river moving backward
under the cloisters
six years away from this pavement
decades since I was a citizen
of this city of traps
Mahagony-on-the-Hudson
walking the labyrinth
time runs backward
like the river
flushed by the lunar mass
I feel like the ghost of the tenements
pulling a carnival of perished friends
down avenues
between the polished storefronts
2. Escape From Sirens
stepping through the park at night
the smallest hour
lamps lit along the footpath
lawns gleam in moonglow
thickets cropped back from the walkway
a margin of safety
lovers on benches
susurration of girls in leaves
boys passing a joint
from hand to hand in the shadows
of vast branches
seven thousand nights ago
this place was a pit
of rape and robbery
where madness met suicide
I was hunted here
but tonight I stroll
through the easy nocturne of the breeze
toward sleep
free of sirens
3. The Old Temple
hunched tenor
like a reversed ess
wave rebounding underpulse
brush touch
bells on cymbals
bass like a gong on a distant tower
music as deepsea singing
wind under wave
under drowned stone
currents off the moon
drums of backlit grotto
like the sound-well in the cave of Karpathos
the return
epistrophe
tides lightrays showering down
through wrack and kelp rope
slit by shadows
in the old temple
[Fred Anderson, tenor sax; Joseph Jarman, alto sax & bass flute; Tatrsu
Aoki, bass; Al Fielder, drums. The Old Synagogue, Norfolk St., N.Y., N.Y.]
4. Return, Again
after a decade in the sea
I'm back in the old city
where so many friends are buried
on every avenue a tablet
of ice and smoke
the streets are stripped of hoboes
and the muttering mad
'safety' is the password
through the locked corners
in the parks nannies and their kith
spread over the bloodless grass
Myopia - the city where money
is fully conscious
and liberty is a new kind
of confinement
pigeons circle like kites
over the Towers of Silence
and citizens look at the sky
with anxious eyes
waiting for abuses
Boeings rocket overhead
an avalanche of light swoops
from the sun and shatters
glittering on the sidewalk
sometime rain sweetens the gutters
the children laugh a little
and the money grows greener
opening its fresh fleshy petals
5. Debussy in Virginia
a thrush in a cage
the air is green with heat
Cynthia's flute breathes
with the birds
lush chords from "voile"
veil or sail
a carrousel of brass and beads
Bob's hands on the keys -
of the baby grand
summer music
Debussy scales the steps
to the white-beamed ceiling
rubato from the left hand
the flute's tender regret
for the cloistered singer
6. Myopia's Blue Beaches
nomad Mars wanders near
the superior planet
closer than he's been in six hundred years
but tonight we make
anti-martian music
to turn theae beaches blue
smokin' peace-piano
unfurl the word-world
praise pays
but not in cash
unlocks the tongues of things
under these big oaks
scent of oakleaves and lightning
singing shadows
mansplash keys
I say please
to the soft rustle
finger muscle
walks among the mallets
cat dances on the harp
new shapes burst the choked throat of the sentence
beyond speech swim the planets of utterance
my friends
the whole earth is in revolt
it's catch up or get off!
the wood is wise
the ivory knows
reed is a mouthpiece for the sky
red frog's dying is a song
bullets will not kill
so save your breath my friends
you'll need it
this poet brays and hoots
calling owls to swoop
and brush off the roof
new forms spill through the hot crust
of old words at this speed
we've hit the skyway, Joel
we're skating on fast ice
gravity waves bounce
saxophone tones into twelve-dimensional space
out of the freshwet form
is born
a new substance
a continent that astonishes the truth
Callisto
born to damp the heats of strife
with her cool ursuline smile
the evilest lie of Mars
that it's no soul and no future
[Recording with Joel Futterman in Virginia Beach, VA]
7. ZAUM - Tiagananda's Neutron Forest
by the jacobite banks
a shore peopled by selfish shellfish
Persian mermen shine
the signs inside the spines
of lumian moongirls
quasar planet's wilderness
of transrational colors
polycosmic frictionless light
some pulsar's spectrum
beyond violet deeper than red
massive abstractions of primes
terraced plantation of glowing mold
absolute motion in relative space
unterran growth climbs
from mind to no-mind
a distribution of primes
in an inverted intersection of arc
some representation-relation
of nonrepresentationalities
shapes in another space
time running in all directions
[Tiagananda's sculpture garden, Yogaville, VA]
8. Hats On!
I see the spirits assembled; they have their hats on. Swedenborg.
the angel of speech has given you a present
each word unpetals to reveal inner words
which pop like seeds from a pod
blooming in the air like cloud-gardens
as we walk together our interplay
exfoliates into a labyrinth of books
spliced thoughts twisted ideas
shards of verse imperial entanglements
'til one of us halts in the traffic, blinking
where are we going? where are we now?
usually to the movies but we may never reach
that dark oasis of popcorn and violence
another angel hums in your ear like a midge
a gloomy paralyzing dwarf of malice
gnawing migraine viper terror at 4:00am
weeping clinging kelpie of awful solitude
I know that bastard try to remember the present
unwrap it pick up a pencil wet your brush
open the window go barefoot through the rainy room of elms
pray to the keratocephalus faun and write me a letter
9. Marian (1945-2005)
Marian dancer and gatherer
refreshed her garden
on the wooded hill of Baltimore
with sweet water
in the saffron-lidded morning and
left a trail
of florets like yellow buckles
on the turf
she lay down with a migraine and
like Callisto
left us with a star-like smile
in the purple
coverlet of night
and greater yet a portion
of her life
breathes and dances
in the same soft
petal-dappled dawn
we see her present
in the generous
glory of the day
and the child's light limbs
[End of MYOPIA]
POEMS FOR YGDRAZIL
Night Music
~~~~~~~~~~~
Inside your body I discover the most preposterous
mathematics. Textures multiply, nerves and rough
substances weave noises. Noses select particular
odors: trumpets, oil and spit, uncarded wool, hot
grease and burnt brass, a lingering stink of decis-
ions postponed, a possible future postponed. Blood
and sex, wet reeds, rich sounds of the mouth, hum
and buzz, the body's hope of song. Squish and slap
like seals or sea otters. Submarine songbirds. Metal
feathers sweep the seafloor. Starfish surface in the
tide inside us. Moon swimming in the seed of heaven.
Sensations we have in infinite series: Let's squander
our riches my love!
Smoking in the Studio
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
proximate fatherhood daughterdom
our four hands on a piano of water
the hunger of 4:00am sobs on the step
leaves of talk a voice from the sky
cigarette arbors avenues gesturing
posing supposing
breathe three times
and dip your eye for a joke
wave
your brush at your broken foot smile
pressing your iron on copper over
and over in the midnight beyond
midnight texts of loss impressions of lonely
each a melancholy memory of love
each leaf fingered touched traced
not one stroke too many for inscription
that trails from a heart torn in
the infancy of your skin to the
companion of accomplished days
put your firm thumb on the keys
draw
the metal slides smoothly
in its grooves and smells like
tomorrow-by-the-sea
your unloved body burnt from the inside
by acids you scratch a mirror
on a copper sheet it's a pathway
you push toward a meadow of sunlight
a lamp glows in the shadows of a room over there
bread cools on the shelf like a promise
one day quite soon this school
of sadness will close for you
and you will wake up to brighter appetites
your strong legs will propel you
where your cool hands guide you
like herons to the clearest water
Skeezix
~~~~~~~
this girl her aura of black agate
queen of needles regnant and outcast
of Brooklyn's gelid lilac night
bleeding from the armpit whorled soles
of her feet cold and broke bitter
and brittle hard as glass frozen
and lunar as money bones like pith
or foam birdlike or a crisp exoskeleton
hollow as a locust's ghost she slips
along the punctate avenue sweat
like a January tide clings to
the smooth curve of her spine
a frosty swamp beneath her breasts
she flies the heat and speeds
along the concrete glancing anxiously
at taxis stuffed with johns and dollars
she craves the pillowy puff of smack
in belly and legs as her cold toes turn
leading her toward that smokewhite
haven a warm room giddy with shit
smiling like a rope choking her
frail vein that solace that friendly
whispering slow snow clutch
that loving deathly love so certain
so always true so full so freely
filling and light it drifts in all
those bleak hugh places fills in
all the empty spaces and she floats away
Giraldus
~~~~~~~~
Giraldus loops heavy coils of chain
around his thoracic bell and hauls his clacked
manubrium up out of the fire. He wills
a crack in the blocked wall of the heart. He strives
against the corruptors of tongues. He breaks the sticks
of these sneaks. Wax he applies to the tips of his fingers
with light precision. It's all part of his plan
to rescue the homunculus. He'll sift
the waves of starlight through the gaps
in the barn roof onto the curling lines
of dust - smokey silent encrypted script -
leading to the hay wain.
Under this ancient truck a passage drills
stone steps down into the dark rich blackness
of the capital. Beneath the city is another city:
Thanatopolis - the tombs, the catacombs, the inverted tower.
Bells boom through the webbed maze. Black rat,
river and sewer offal, cloacal stench - yes,
crawl this pit sacred to death under the town
into a bell-sodden dawn brain illuminated -
palm to palm and lip to lip with junky
and leather girl pressing the heart, crushing
the heart - give without hope, break the last law:
love without reservation.
What does the light say now, when you wake on the barn
floor drunk as the king of cups with a storm of swords
slitting the air above your pink and bleeding gut?
Giraldus, companion of the campanile, seal your scar
with waxy fingers - it's an adornment to the fascia
of Camper. (No shield at all - it's the punched
ticket of your convictions.) Sure you've been there
and you don't have to go back, but you know the way
and now you'll never be lost - and if you drag your chains
behind you and a track of bloody footprints,
remember you flow through the goddam cracks in your heart
and you'll never stop flowing.
Mood Indigo
~~~~~~~~~~~
hope is to sow
fields of color
and form on the empty steppe
do you still have memories
you painters
of a place without volume
I have tried to recall
the shapes
which were born
without substance
sometimes I think
I remember
vast expanses of emptiness
uncontained by geometry
unstained by pigment
when I open my eyes
the blank of day is right here
like a plain
without forests
or rivers
and desire rises to people
the distant deep horizon
with bodies I can love
the mind moves and the grasses
tremble in xanthous light
flax shocks the air
and the mouth
a glass of scalding tea
drunk on the slope of a blue mound
and to reach the hand out
to apply paint
with the fingertips
indigo for example
which thrusts a cool
catheter deep as sleep
into the heaving aorta
of Niobe
this is the plasma
the painter strews
when she thrashes her brush
in the spacious air
over the frontier
on her side of the membrane
around us the noise
the brutal squawk
but here before
this paradox
a torus contained
on a flat surface
pressed in a palm
smeared with indigo
and a map
to the core
of a paradise
a shield of indigo feathers
and songs
too beautiful to be entirely grief
Letter to Jack
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
in the murky hollows of the night
through the clank and almighty drumroll of the drags
the groans and thunders the vasty lightnings of the plains
with pencil and pocket notebook in the withering moonlight
dreaming of death and shimmery heavens 'slow dusts of soft'
you always come back to the bleak loneliness of river
loneliness of cities under snow and dreams of coldmilk supper
loneliness of wrecked and moody Lowell shadow Third Street
your childhood was a long dream of death and tinsel paradise
incense and soup steamy kitchen smells and a boy saint
the gilded coffin handles kindle the tired eyes
and grey tenement houses lean on each others shoulders
crackling radios through papered windows and the snap
and punch of football games you could push your way out
ten yards at a time breakthrough into the backfield of the library
but death went to your head Jack so you sang the sorrow of life
hunched in the Automat on a rainy afternoon
bip-boop-uh-de-ou-bop in your ear digging the whole clattery scene
the slouch hat hands-in pockets guys the dope weary whores
tottering under the trafficlights the smeary bums and snappy cabbies
delivery boys in uniforms office girls in shapely frocks and flocks
pincil scoots across the damp page and your chair rocks
to a beat nobody noticed but you though we all hear it now
and you were scatting Jack the simple griefs of the American night
all that freedom is a big empty space and every day is open
until the night closes in on the grimey hobo holymen
bent over a barrel-fire their hard hands passing a pint
of tokay back and forth yes there are visions here too
behind those red eyes the fellaheen crouch in the great dark
thats where the blues is under those hats in the Cameo Hotel
in the jails on the heartbreak farms under the broken windows
of ruined factories and doesnt that shattered glass glitter like jazz
in the darkling bars in the benzedrine haze the notes ripple out
just like everyday life and the shouts and the laughs come down
in the easy kind of madness its the jazz of work
or hunger and hangover in the early bright and Bop City at night
boplicity boperation epistrophes of crazed and happy gloom
and girls voices and girls glances and their sad sweetness
its love love in the lofts among the squashed pigments
then they go dont they Jack or we do in a dash to lonesome freedom
so long Jack you're deep in the dream of death now
out there in the golden eternity with the Virgin of Unemployment
in the empty light crashing on the dread shores of California
in the silent margins of the city in the ride cymbal of the night
in the intoxiction yes and exhaltation of each solitary woman
and child and man driven mad and wise by beginningless anguish
I mean the particular ones the ones you saw and heard and told of
the ones we remember now the ones we call by name
Bags*
~~~~
willow dogs whisper in the slant green rain
cool ivory rings link solitary stars in coils of snow
and the wind laughs like a girl in an empty room
moonlight in snowy pools bends like a willow in the black wind
coils of rain on a december evening
wet streets empty as white rooms
silent hours snow and a barking dog
quiet slope of avenue between rows of willows
buds dust each branch with a breath of green
on a march morning heaven as blue as liquid metal
wrinkled by swift thrusts of chill spring wind
young gusts spread roses like a knife
as yellow cat tops garden wall of brick
and blind windows wink blue avenues
azure days ambush a city transfigured by solitude
into an ivory ring on a smooth brown finger
linked to a system of dreams in a quiet room
and canine light on a white house cuts through a pink shutter
like a shank between the ribs of an old
man whose junes have stained his blue
veined muscles and ambushed his final flesh
*For Milt Jackson, "Bags".
Heavy Soul
~~~~~~~~~~
I live on a rough ridged rock set
like a loaf of bread in a blue dish
every brilliant morning the sun wets his moustache in the sea
and I rise from dreams of the City of Spikes
laughter of ghost junkies graces of spectral whores
smiling through cigarette smoke
brown skin in the xanthous eternal twilight of the tenements
On The Stroll
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
memory fills the morning
light off the cold silver sea
won't drive it away
in the loft on 35th Street
I felt her close the fist of her heart
she looked like junk and smelt like ether
O the lemniscate tracks in the dust
this is the month when cats die
Wasted
~~~~~~
in the lightless depths of the sea there is a trembling
candles in the dismal room make points in your blue eyes
the grinning monkey is caged in the corner
slumped in the couch your blond hair a sad banneret
cigarette smoke twirls like mist in a grey wind
Aphrodite Eitymbria

G.M. FOSTER
Tapestry
~~~~~~~~
I see the wind in a dream
raveling and unraveling
the white yarn of the sea
a row of gulls guards the spit
dark water-rocks
quivering black and amber
in hot slanting light
the shingle winks along the shore
wet as a cheek
the footpath tapestried with catches
scratches arches
diademed with thorns
even the smallest of bright things
will soon fill up with night
out there between islands
the flukes of a sinking secret
peace seems as faint and far away
as magellanic clouds
***
All poems copyright 2007 Greg Foster

All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
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prohibited.
YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2007 by
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